Museum of Communication at Burntisland

Audio

The history of recorded sound is indeed a complex story to tell. In its life of just over a century, so much has happened to transform the first tin-foil phonograph made to CD players and the digital MP3 revolution we are seeing today.

The record player (or phonograph) is an electromechanical instrument, used for reproducing sound from a record. A record is a vinyl disk, which has a spiral groove with tiny bumps on the walls of the groove (the bumps encode a musical or other type of recording. The American inventor, Thomas Edison built the first practical record player in 1877. The first recording was made with an indented stylus attached to a diaphragm which, in turn, was hooked up to a telephone speaker. A strip of paraffin coated paper was run underneath the stylus while Edison shouted into the speaker, leaving an indentation in the paper. As the paper was pulled back under the stylus the faint sound of his voice could be heard. Edison had intended the phonograph to be used primarily as a dictating machine in offices. However, with the invention of the gramophone, by the German-born American inventor Emile Berliner in 1887, the record player began to develop as an artistic medium for recording music.

A forerunner of the gramophone, the 1907 clockwork Columbia Graphophone (see left) used a rotating wax cylinder with 4 minutes playing time. The Columbia Graphophone Company was one of the earliest gramophone companies (now Columbia Records) which competed with Edison's phonograph.

By 1927, the horn Gramophone had pride of place in many homes. It used the familiar black shellac discs, which rotated at 78rpm - provided the machine was fully wound (see right).

The portable Gramophone managed without a horn - to increase the volume, you simply opened the door at the front (to the left there is a photograph of a Cliftophone Portable, 1932).

DID YOU KNOW: The production of records were halted by the advent of World War II and the lack of shellac (material used for the "old 78s") due to the invasion of South East Asia by the Japanese. The replacement of the base material was discovered from a plastic resin derivative of petroleum called vinyl (the golden era of vinyl now begins).

Mary J. MacDonald, 6 Oct 2005

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